Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [168]
I think I hear the clatter of horses’ hooves bringing salon guests in their carriage, the brawling and catcalling of hooligans wandering into the square, the yelp of stray dogs, the squeak of doors opened halfway and then just as swiftly shut. I can see lights behind the French windows. Then I must imagine these lights going out, one by one, followed by the sound of doors and of footsteps and carriage wheels on the cobblestones again, not everyone eager to run into anyone else, yet everyone forced to exchange perfunctory pleasantries under the arcades, as some head home two or three doors away or pretend to head home but head elsewhere instead.
An hour later the square is quiet.
On my last evening in Paris, I drop by L’Ambroisie. It’s almost closing time. I have come to inquire about the name of the dessert whiskey they had offered us at the end of our previous evening’s meal. The waiter does not recall.
He summons the sommelier, who appears, like an actor, from behind a thick curtain. The man seems pleased by the question. The whiskey’s name is Poit Dhubh, aged twenty-one years. Before I know it he brings out two bottles, pours a generous amount from one, and then asks me to sample the other. These, it occurs to me, are the best things I’ve drunk during a week in France. I find it strange, I say, that I should end my visit by discovering something Scottish and not French. One of the waiters standing nearby comes forward and says it is not entirely surprising. Why so, I ask? “Had it not been for the Scotsman Montgomery, who by accident killed Henry II during a joust, the Hôtel des Tournelles would never have been leveled and therefore the Place des Vosges would never have been built!”
I leave the restaurant. There are people awaiting taxis outside. Everyone is speaking English. Suddenly, from nowhere, four youths appear on skateboards, speeding along the gallery, yelling at one another amid the deafening rattle of their wheels, mindless of everyone and everything in their path as they course through the arcades. As though on cue, all bend their knees at the same time and, with their palms outstretched like surfers about to take a dangerously high wave, they tip their skateboards, jumping over the curb and onto the street, riding all the way past the cruel Rouillac’s house, past the bend around Victor Hugo’s, finally disappearing into the night.
Only then can I imagine the sound of another group of young men. They are shouting—some cursing, some urging one another on, still others hastily ganging up for the kill. I can hear the ring of rapiers being drawn, the yells of the frightened, everyone on the Place suddenly alert, peering out their windows, petrified. I look out and try to imagine how the torches of the four swordsmen must have swung in pitch darkness on that cold night in January 1614. How very, very long ago it all seems, and yet—as I look at the lights across the park—it feels like yesterday. And like all visitors to the Place des Vosges, I wonder whether this is an instance of the present intruding on the past or of the past forever repeated in the present. But then, it occurs to me, this is also why one comes to stay here for a week: not to forget the present, or to restore the past, but to forget that they are so profoundly different.
Solar-Powered Timekeeping in Paris
SUSAN ALLPORT
JUST AS MUCH as I love stone, I also love sundials and I love that the author of this piece went in search of some with her husband in Paris. I’ve seen two that she mentions, and I intend to track down the others, but not mentioned here is one of my favorites, at 19 rue du Cherche-Midi. It is actually a stone bas-relief of a man with a beard holding a tablet of a sundial. On the other side of the tablet, helping to hold it up, is a cupid. The man’s right hand has come to rest at a spot where the line for noon and the figure XII are missing, and the inscription below this reads, “Je Cherche Midi” (I seek noon).